Building the HMT web site

As part of our broader effort to automate the management of the expanding digital resources of the Homer Multitext project, we have recently defined four sections of the www.homermultitext.org web site:

1. archival data (hmt-data)
2. technical documentation (hmt-doc)
3. programs developed for the HMT (hmt-code)
4. end-user applications (hmt-apps)

The content is written in markdown in four repositories hosted on bitbucket.org.  The markdown pages are converted to HTML5 and formatted for inclusion in the HMT web site using mdweb,  a minimal system for managing structured documentation in markdown syntax which you can find among our first listings in the new hmt-code section of the site (here).

We hope that with this very lightweight documentation system we will be able to keep these sections of the web site up to date more easily.  The new system has already simplified mirroring those sections of the HMT web site:  you can currently find clones of all four sections on katoptron.holycross.edu.

To coordinate blog entries here with content on the homermultitext.org web site, we will include tags parallel to the four web site sections (data, doc, code, apps) on discussion here relevant to one of those sections.

University of Houston High Performance Computing Center

The High Performance Computing Center at the University of Houston has provided invaluable support to the Homer Multitext project for several years.  If you have ever used one of our zoomable images, the stream of image data comes from amphoreus.hpcc.uh.edu, a machine dedicated to the Homer Multitext project's work.  In January when I visited the University of Houston, part of the warm hospitality included a tour of the astonishing facilities there.

amphoreus.hpcc.uh.edu is part of this massive rack

Later this spring, HPCC extended their support by creating a second, virtual machine where we can test software in development before moving better tested, stable versions to amphoreus.  One of our first experiences on the test machine has been to use Nexus, a repository management system, as a way to publish versioned packages of software, textual editions and other material created by the HMT project.

Left, Keith Crabb, director of HPCC;  right, Alan Pfeiffer-Traum, system managing magician; center, I attempt to impersonate a professor in a suit.

This support is allowing us to reorganize both the way we make our archival material available to others, and the way we automatically use our archival material internally within the HMT project.  We'll post more details here as new parts of our reorganized system are publicly released.  Meanwhile, once again, thanks to Keith Crabb, the manager of the High Performance Computing Center at UH, and to Alan Pfeiffer-Traum, the system administrator who keeps everything running around the clock.  Their support for the work of HMT editor Casey Dué, and for the HMT project as a whole, is dramatically changing the ways our material will reach the internet.

“Some examples…”

A phrase we try to avoid in every aspect of our work on the Homer Multitext is “some examples”.

This phrase is a hallmark of an older school of scholarship, in which select experts had exclusive access to the data on which knowledge depends. When these experts published their discoveries and insights, they would support their arguments with “some examples”.

This was not scientific scholarship, where “scientific” means “reproducible”. “Some examples” are clearly marked as a sub-set of the data behind the argument, whose authors built their expertise on a super-set of the data that they made available to the reading public.

Obviously, the physical and economic limitations of traditional print publication generally precluded publishing exhaustive sets of data, especially for scholarship that involved artifacts like manuscripts. But whether intentional or not, “some examples” are explicitly not an invitation to follow the trail of thought, discovery, and insight.

For the Homer Multitext, we think it is important to expose every bit of data we have, before we try to make arguments about it.

Manuscript Collation in the 21st Century

It seems worth restating an obvious benefit that the on-line publication of high resolution images of multiple Homeric manuscripts offers. As was made clear to us again and again during our recent two week summer seminar, when you find something in a manuscript that you don't understand, it is often illuminating to look at other manuscripts. When Martin West or Helmut Van Thiel made their editions of the Iliad, if they wanted to check the contents of the Venetus A directly, they had to make a costly trip to Venice, where they might be allowed to look at the manuscript for a few hours, perhaps, if they were very lucky, over the course of a few days. (When our team was in Venice, we were able to in fact see the handwritten log of visitors that recorded these visits.) If West or Van Thiel noticed something that reminded them, however vaguely, of something they had seen in one of the Escorial manuscripts in Spain, another costly and time consuming trip would have been required to make a comparison. (I believe Martin West was in fact able to make use of a microfilm provided by the Esorial, as have we before we photographed those manuscripts. But he almost certainly was not able to use that microfilm while looking at the Venetus A.) Last week at the seminar, we were able to make direct comparisons again and again between manuscripts that have perhaps never been in the same room. So for example, when students noticed a particular siglum in book 7 of the Venetus A that was used to connect a small subset of intermarginal scholia with the word being commented upon in the poem — a method of linking not typical in the Venetus A, which relies instead upon placement and lemmata to connect text and scholia —we were immediately able to look at Escorial manuscript Ω.1.12 (E4), which makes use of a similar siglum for a particular group of scholia in that manuscript.

In the next month we are planning to make available on a test server an all new manuscript browser. Unlike previous versions, this one will be able to display all of our data, and it will do so in a way that will make perfectly clear the relationships between all the different materials we have collected so far. So for example, you'll be able to ask for line 1.1 of the Iliad, and you'll get a page that will give you the option to also display, in addition to the Greek text of any given manuscript for which we have a diplomatic edition, the manuscript folios and papyri that contain that verse, and what scholia comment upon it. The more editions that we create and publish, the more options there will be for you to choose from. So very soon you will able to collate manuscripts from Spain and Venice (and Geneva and London and so on) side by side, something that has never before been realistically possible. The system will always be a work in progress, in that we will continue to feed it new data as we acquire or create it, but the tools themselves that will enable such browsing are elegant, simple, and flexible — not to mention open source and platform independent. We look forward to sharing this exciting new development with you soon.

The Venetus A and Escorial manuscript Ω.1.12 side by side

e-codices project chooses Creative Commons license

For anyone interested in Greek and Latin manuscripts, the scholarly landscape changed dramatically last week when the e-codices project announced that all its material is now available under a Creative Commons license.  For several years, the e-codices project has been putting high-resolution digital photography of manuscripts, together with exemplary cataloging information, on line.   Now, you can reuse its photography of more than 900 manuscripts under the terms of CC's Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported license.


So if you'd like to start work on Cod. Bodmer 85, a manuscript of the Iliad with scholia, you are free to download and work with any of the e-codices photographs, and you are permitted to "copy, distribute and transmit the work" for non-commercial purposes provided you include proper attribution to e-codices.


All of the Homer Multitext project's original digital photography is licensed with CC licenses, too.  We'll certainly be thinking hard about how best to interact with and reuse CC-licensed material from other sources — now including e-codices. 

Student Presentations at the CHS Summer Seminar 2012

What's going on here?

Folio 98v of the Venetus A

As Mary Ebbott noted in the last post, teams of undergraduates and faculty members have been hard at work at the CHS this week, creating a diplomatic edition of the text and scholia of book 7 of the Iliad in the Venetus A manuscript. As each team has grappled with the folios of this incredibly complex tenth-century document, they have each begun to explore different problems or items of interest. Today, the students gave preliminary presentations about their work. The topics ranged from the layout of the scholia on particular folios to the means of linking scholia to the text of the poem to the exploration of the implications of particular scholia. The work of each group has resulted not only in work that has never been done before, but work that has never before been possible. Never before have we had the ability to closely compare manuscripts that reside separately in Spain and Italy for example, nor have we ever had the data and the tools to perform the kind of searches and collations and calculations that are now possible.

Each team will continue to both expand and refine their research in the coming months for a variety of audiences, including this blog and various research symposia. This two week seminar has only been the beginning of their research and their participation in the Homer Multitext. So please stay tuned for more about their work. 

As for what's going on in this image, you'll have to wait for the students to tell you more. But it is not as simple as it may seem at first glance. Take a closer look, and see what you think.

Detail from folio 98v of the Venetus A

Week One of the CHS summer seminar 2012

The first week of the Center for Hellenic Studies summer seminar introduced nine undergraduates and their faculty mentors from four colleges/universities (University of Washington, Trinity University in San Antonio, Furman University, College of the Holy Cross) to the Homer Multitext (HMT): its goals, theoretical foundations, and methods. These students began working on a digital edition of Iliad 7 of the Venetus A manuscript. Using the high-resolution digital photographs published through the HMT, the students learned the “palaeography” of the manuscript, the handwriting used and the system of abbreviations and ligatures that the scribe employed. They were also introduced to using XML mark-up for their digital editions. Their first task was to read the manuscript and create a digital diplomatic edition of the poetic text of Iliad 7. The students work in teams of two or three, and each team has multiple folios to complete. The teams were then introduced to the methods for creating an inventory of the scholia, the marginal scholarly commentary (see Recapturing a Homeric Legacy, Chapter 1 by Blackwell & Dué for a description of what is found on the pages of the Venetus A). The inventory is linked to the digital images, so that the user can easily and rapidly check the edition against the manuscript itself. The students then learned how to create a diplomatic edition of the scholia in XML, including mark-up for features such as personal names, place names, and quotations.

Iliad 7 opens with the return of Hektor and Paris to the battlefield, and then recounts the duel between Hektor and Ajax, the Trojan assembly’s discussion of whether they should return Helen (they ultimately offer to return her possessions, but not Helen herself—the Achaeans reject that offer), and the famously controversial building of the Achaean wall. This week the students will finish creating their editions of the scholia in Iliad 7 in the Venetus A and will discover how the ancient commentators thought about these parts of the poem. Once again, stay tuned for more!

Folio 91r of the Venetus A, with the beginning of Iliad 7